rr and Pernosco author Robert O'Callahan quits Google because he thinks AI progress is 'far too rapid'
Robert O'Callahan's blog / Hacker News (197pts, 244 comments)·low signal
O'Callahan worked on hardware chip-design tools that would speed up AI chip development. He writes that his team's goal of making AI cheaper and lower-latency is one he now considers harmful. He cites reward hacking, misalignment, deceptive models, cognitive surrender and power concentration, and says influencing things from inside Google wasn't enough. He will keep maintaining rr and Pernosco and plans to study how AI agents debug code.